JF Ptak Science Books – A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

JF Ptak Science Books

A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

Contact johnfptak at gmail dot com

World War I in Ivory–Pianos and Recovery

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1409

These images come from my collection of World War I news photo service photographs, and are among the minority that show even momentary happiness. In both of these cases, the emotion resolves itself in song and in the piano. The first image takes place in a U.S. overseas hospitals for wounded soldiers, and they seem genuinely relieved to have the attention and the entertainment. (Both images are available at our blog bookstore.)

The second image is dated 2 November 1918–just nine days before the armistice–and shows the “Broadway Quartet” as they rehearse “I’m Only a Buck Private” for a behind-the-lines show for U.S. servicemen, somewhere in France. The note with the image (from the Western Newspaper Union) says that the staging used for their shows came from found wood, bits of flooring, and camouflage netting torn into pieces.

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Making Things Disappear–German POWs, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1410

In continuing series of posts on Blank and Empty Things is this image on fading, disappearing German prisoners of war. The French had been pounding them in western France in the summer of 1918, and Germans were surrendering and being captured by the thousands. This news service photograph shows one of the assembly camps with about 10,000 POWs–I made a heavy scan of the group of soldiers in the distance and was a little taken aback to see that the men had lost their human forms, looking like bacteria, fading into their future. (The original photo is available for purchase through our blog bookstore.)

The full image is impressive, and shows just a small fraction of the men taken prisoner during 1918; and it shows even a lesser percentage of those killed.

This detail of the foreground shows the familiarity necessitated by the men being pressed so closely together–there was little free ground.

Also, I thought that the French soldiers in the midst of the prisoner might’ve been feeding them, but it seems as though they were just walking in their midst.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Militaria — World War I
A Graphical Representation of Journal Articles on Relativity Theory, 1896-1923

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I haven’t often seen graphical representations showing the relative publishing interests in a particular discipline of the sciences, or the maths either for that matter. But that’s exactly what is found in the deep pages of Maurice Lecat‘s Bibliographie de la Relativité, suivie d’un appendice sur les déterminants à deux dimensions, le calcul des variations, les séries trigonométriques, et l’azéotropisme, published in Bruxelles by Lamertin in 1924. [The original text is offered for sale at our blog bookstore.] The graph is called “Production Annuelle d’Ecrit sur la Relativite”, and shows the total number of articles published in that area–or at least those identified by the verifiable Lecat, who finds more than 4,000 of them for the 1896-1922 1/2 period.

We track the year of publication on the X and the number of publications on the Y, and we can see that before the great 1905 special theory was published by Einstein that Lecat considered some dozens of other papers (actually more than 200) to fall into that (pre-Einsteinian relativity) category. It is interesting to note that “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” paper (30 June 1905) is not indicated with a vertical “Einstein” for that year (like the for indicator for 1915/16), though Lecat does indicate the general decline in relativity papers in the 1914-1916 period was probably caused by WWI. The number of papers does triple and then quadruples in year one and two of the peace.

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Films from U.K. National Archives, 1940. Winning the War for Hearts and Minds at Home.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1412

Interesting films produced by the Office of Information, mostly 1940 and 1941, and found at the (U.K) National Archives.

London Can Take It! (Battle of Britain, 1941)

“This film, in which the American journalist, Quentin Reynolds pays tribute to London and its people under fire, conveys the spirit and atmosphere of the 1940 blitz on the capital. Its impact at the time, especially in U.S.A., makes it historically one of the most important of the war films.”

“The production file in the National Archives – TNA: INF6/328 states that the film was to be ‘distributed throughout U.S.A, Canada and Latin-America by Warner Bros’ and was to be shown in ‘at least 15,000 American cinemas’.” Relseased 1941.

Hitler Takes Command

“Cleverly edited montage footage taken from German propaganda films, including Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph Des Willens, which shows Hitler and his marching Soldiers of the Reich, synchronised to the tune of ‘The Lambeth Walk’.” Relseased 1941.

Dig for Victory

“An appeal to everyone during wartime to ‘Dig for victory’ by cultivating vegetables for the good of the country and their own better health.

Words for Battle.

“The production file held at the National Archives – TNA: INF 6 / 507 states that ‘a re-edited version was made by Spectator for inclusion in the fortnightly reels for Russia’ and that material was used from other Ministry of Information Films including ‘How to dig’, ‘Sowing and planting’ and ‘Cultivation’.”

“Words for Battle evocatively sets to film passages of quotation from poetry and prose including works by: Milton, Blake, Browning and Kipling. The famous “we shall never surrender” speech by Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address are also quoted in the Film. It powerfully associates these passages and music by Handel and Beethoven with images of everyday life in Britain at war.

The Crown Film Unit file held in the National Archives: TNA: INF 6/338 synopsis reads: ….“A call to arms through images and words of Britain’s countryside, people and poets”.

Released 1941, and read by Lawrence Olivier.

Workers’ Weekend (A Tribute to the Workers of the British Aircraft Industry)

‘A tribute to the workers of the British Aircraft Industry’. Men and women in a factory in the North-West of England set themselves the task of building a Wellington bomber in the record time of 30 hours. Constructing in their own time, the workers donate the bonus they got to the Red Cross ‘Aid to Russia Fund’.

The cameras capture the whole process of the construction in record time through to the test pilot taking off in the plane, ahead of schedule.”

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Militaria — Social History
Ancient Motion Pictures, London, 1896/1903

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1413

I just wanted to share these films that I found at the British Film Institute’s youtube account. They are remarkable, clear, fluid images of London in 1903/1913 or thereabouts, offering a slice of relatively unrehearsed life from 100 years ago that is so unexpected. They are visual time capsules, beautifully restored by the BFI–they are like moving picture versions of sumptuous platinum prints, with gorgeous detail in each frame, so lovely that they look as though they could withstand micro inspection.

The first: London, 1903:

Blackfriar’s Bridge, 1896–very short, but again, another remarkable piece of moving history…if only there was sound.

Trafalgar Square Riot for Mrs. Pankhurst, 1913:

Petticoat Lane, a semi-ancient marketplace east of Central London, showing a common look to common folk buying and selling common stuff, 1903:

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Photography, history
The Almost-Tomorrow Department: Radio-Vision, 1928.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1415

Tomorrow seemed to be almost there to readers of this pamphlet, what with the idea of looking at pictures relating to the radio broadcast you were listening to looming before a slightly disbelieving mind. The fact of the matter though is that this breakthrough by Mr. Austin G. Cooley¹–basically attaching what we would know today as a fax machine to a radio cabinet which would receive and print images relating to the show being heard–was rubbing up mightily against the real wave of the future, the television. (The original is available here at our blog bookstore.)

Mr. Cooley’s invention of the Rayfoto just didn’t quite fit the demands that would soon be established and met by television. The idea of practical television goes back a fair way², at least to Arthur Korn in the late 1890’s, which much work being done on both broadcast television and facsimile transmissions. But tv was definitely a high scent in the air when Cooley published his Rayfoto pamphlet in 1928–as a matter of fact, this was the same year in which the first television license was granted (to Charles Jenkins, W3XK). And just two years later the BBC would begin regular television broadcasts, while also in 1930 Mr. Jenkins initiated another television-first, the t.v.commercial.

“No greater thrill awaits the radio experimenter than receiving his first picture through the ether…Not many months will pass before picture broadcasts will be a part of every radio broadcast”–A. Cooley, 1928

So the time was definitely note ripe for Cooley’s idea as an image supplement to radio, though it did have other possible applications–like the “fax” delivering newspapers to your home–though they are not listed in the pamphlet.

What we see here the drum of the apparatus (we don’t see the three-tray developer/fixer wet set-up inside the apparatus), one of the listeners retrieving an incoming vision-image, something that evidently took quite some time, depending on the image and the ways in which the developing trays have been set. Dark images might’ve taken the entire length of a 15-minute broadcast to transmit and print; other, simpler efforts took less time.

Here’s an example of a successful, medium-quality image that one could expect using Cooley’s Rayfoto system:

It doesn’t look like much now, and maybe it wouldn’t’ve looked like much to people familiar with the new television. But even a grainy, static image accompanying a voice performance is a fabulous thing when compared with never having seen anything like it before, never having had such an experience, if even only as a novelty.

_______

Notes:

1. Cooley, Austin G. How to Receive Radio Pictures at Home. New York: Radiovision Corp, 1928. 1st edition. 26pp, 2 folding blueprints 4to. This unusual publication describes the construction and use of an apparatus which would receive broadcast (facsimile) images that would be used to illustrate radio transmissions/shows. The idea (in this form of illustrating radio shows) at this date would be reduced to almost-nothingness once television entered the picture in the next year or so. Still, it was an elegant idea to illustrate the spoken word.

This system was offered by Austin G. Cooley (1900-1993), inventor of the Rayfoto system, “the first authentic radio picture apparatus”. This was a very early attempt at mass entertainment via a mechanical medium that proved ineffective by 1929/1931 against the advances of television. (The radiovision method was something like a facsimile device, offering a static image every now and again, and was completely outclassed by the moving image).

2. Followed by Paul Nipkow’s rotating discs in the earliest part of the 20th c, then by Vladimir Zworkin’s iconoscope (1923), Charles Jenkins and John Baird’s television of 1924, and then of course by Philo Farnsworth’s 1928 image dissector.

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Anticipation, History of — Future, History of the — Technology, History of
U.S. Wartime Production, Control, and Patriotic Propaganda, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1416

The War Production Board (WPB)–the entity responsible for printing the leaflets below–was instituted 16 January 1942 as a federal effort to direct U.S. wartime production and allocation of essential commodities. And time. The WPB centralized the effort to convert some peacetime industry to wartime production, as well as direct the production of existing wartime industries in the manufacture of critical goods, and rationed or prohibited the manufacture of other material that could possibly hinder the war effort. Thus the WPB rationed things like sugar, heating oil, plastic, gasoline, paper, rubber, nylon and metals of all descriptions; it also controlled large swaths of the workforce, restricting wages and benefits as well as prices.   It was an essential element of fighting the war, and brought necessary control to an economy and industrial base that needed organization for what would become a total war.        (We offer a small collection of 16 of these items at our blog bookstore.)

Instituting a war-production base for American industry allowed production to ratchet way up, producing (for example) multiples more aircraft more in 1943 than in 1941:   1940, 6k aircraft; 1941, 19k; 1942, 47k; 1943 85k; 1944, 56k; 1945, 46k. Also there were enormous production advancements for total shipping tonnage (reaching a wartime production total of 33 million tons), across-the-board huge increases in coal and iron ore (and especially in crude oil), and on and on. The U.S. was able to mobilize itself and take advantage of its enormous natural resources, industrial base and civilian workforce in what was essentially an unreachable island economy, forming what was actually an unbeatable combination of war goods production. (Plus of course there was the atomic bomb, which is another story, but which also only could have been produced in the U.S., given the enormous quantities of energy and material needed to begin its production.)

The WPB also was responsible for hearts-and-minds campaigns at home, too, because so many people, such a huge proportion of the population, needed to be involved in the war effort, not only from the production standpoint but also for strategic conservation. For example, in one massive effort to collect the very necessary scrap metal (that would be collected and reformed into war materiel) the WPB organized a nation-wide drive that in one day collected 82 pounds for every person in the country. Singular efforts like this, or seemingly singular, needed to happen at regular and short intervals for the war economy to be successful. And so pamphlets like the story of Joe, below, needed to be told:

The “it” that Joe needed to have was ammunition, and grenades, and anything else that would kill the enemy. With it, Joe was successful; without it, and thereby without the “it” being produced by the folks at home to whom this flyer was being distributed, was helping to kill Joe by not giving him enough of the deadly stuff.

“Don’t let Joe down” says the flyer, “its our job to give him everything he needs and wants”. It turns out that Joe had 26 notches in the comb of his rifle, “from the Japs (who would never) get back to report after they met Joe”.   Joe “spread the lead around with a free and easy hand and alot of Japs wished he hadn’t been so generous. Trouble was, he never had quite enough of it…”

And so went the rest of it, and them–resonant pleas, demands, for people at home to be vigilant in whatever it was they were doing to push the war effort forward. Slacking meant death and possible destruction, and the hosts of these flyers that I have here gave very little pre-text for this not to be the case.

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Ancient Motion Pictures, Part II: India, England, France, 1898-1899

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

The first segment here is a collection of Lumiere brothers films, the first of which (made in 1896) shows the release of factory workers at their shift’s end–included are a large number of women:

Another lovely film called “Santa Claus”, which may well be the first movie of Santa ever made (1896):

Even though this 1899 film is entitled “Panorama of Calcutta” it is actually of Varanasi, India:

View from the front of a locomotive, coming into Barnstaple, 1898:

From the great BFI (British Film Institute), a lush moving picture of the launch of the HMS Albion, which actually shows the front end of the making of an enormous Thames River tragedy.

From the BFI channel: “E.P. Prestwich’s footage of the launch of the battleship HMS Albion on 21 June 1898 looks deceptively serene and gentle. What it doesn’t show is that when the ship hit the water for the first time, it created a wave that swept away a jetty, drowning an estimated 39 people in the process, one of the worst peacetime disasters in the Thames’s history.”

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Ancient Motion Pictures, Part III: Street Scenes and Human Urban Landscapes, 1902–Belfast, Wigan, Bradford, Manchester

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Again from the BFI comes a series of absolutely super urban motion picture landscapes showing bits and pieces of ordinary city life at the turn of the century–I find them exquisite. The first is a movie taken from the front of a horse drawn tram in Belfast, 1901, along Royal Street:

Another glorious motion picture of street scenes in a major city at the turn of the century: Manchester, 1902.

Electric tram rides from Forster Square, Bradford, in 1902:

This street scene at Wigan is remarkable for the pure joy of the people who have gathered to be int he film–I particularly like man with his broad-brimmed-hatted daughter on his shoulder towards the end of the film, the father following the camera trying to get his daughter into the film. Just lovely.

cvcv

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Obfuscation as a Weapon–on Teaching Indians to Read, 1875

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1417

This small pamphlet, Easy Reading Lessons for Indian Schools, was published for the Department of Indian Affairs (as a section of the Interior Department, classifying the Indian along the lines of cattle and agriculture) by the federal government, printed by the indomitable Government Printing Office in Washington DC in 1875. (The original is available at our blog bookstore.)

It is an unintentionally quiet indicator of the general American policy towards the Native American in the last quarter of the 19^th century. The work is indifferent to any particular need of the student. It is intended for the person who could not read, and nowhere in this work is there a listing of the alphabet. It is ignominiously but softly complex, and looks to me to be a total disaster as a text. (This is true when comparing the work to nothing at all; but when you stand it next to, say, McGuffey’s reader or the Eclectic or any of the other classic how-to-read books of the 19^th century, the weaknesses of the Indian book become instantly clear.

How in the name of great bog could anyone have thought it just and fair and equitable to teach English-illiterate “Indians” to read with such an instructional? It isn’t even close to being a book, and it comes no where near to being able to transcend its own terminal obliqueness. It introduces simple words and phrases in a tongue-twisting ways, and then complicates the situation by quickly adding more structured words in a more confusing environment. The thing is terrifying. I actually had a hard time reading it out loud.

Here on page 17 (already!) is a tremulous example:

“See the lad. Is it Mat? It is Mat; and Fan is by him on the sod. He has his hat. But it is not on. Has Fan a hat? Mat has a bat. Dan cut it by the bog. Mat had his bat, and ran at my dog Boz., and sat on a log, and hit him. He did it in fun. And Boz had his fun. He got the bat and ran it way and hid it in a box. Dan got it but bid Mat not hit the dog.”

For crying out loud! (The bat by the way is, yes, a baseball bat. Pretty early stuff in 1875.) Why would someone use this series of images to teach someone how to read? The pamphlet continues to exhaustion, taking only 80 pages to do so. For me it is a perfect symbol of the way in which the government—in general—dealt with the “Indian Problem”. Confusing children and making life more needlessly complex, making it harder for them to succeed, making it more difficult for them to rise above the difficult situation that they have unexpectedly been born into, is a superior sign of inferiority of the dominant power.

Wait a minute. Am I writing about the Indian in 1875 or the poor kids in SE DC in 2009? I can’t tell. The corruption of the social model for caring for people who need federal attention more than anyone else—the underprivileged child—is antiquarian and entrenched and as strong as ever. At least there’s a moral foundation for the care of kids whose parents cannot afford health insurance. Um, oh, wait another minute….

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Absurdist, Unintentional — American History: Western Exploration & Native Americans — Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
The Problematic and Unspeakably Brief Beauty of Linoleum: Italy, 1933

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1418

In my imaginary History of Lines there is a chapter or two for humans-in-line(s). In the history of the world, the fourth and fifth decades of the twentieth century—the 1930’s and ‘40’s—were big ones for human lines. Big does not imply good, because as we all know lots of humans lined up for all manner of unspeakable nastiness during this time and well more than 100 million didn’t make it out alive (considering all of the wars, purges, revolutions and stupidity).

The lines here are a little more benign, though with shriveled overtones of corrected respect.

Oppressive obedience in a well-designed environment is still like dressing your ear-infected 14-year-old St. Bernard/Jack Russell (?!) mixed breed in baby booties—its just not right, and these images attest to this simpy comparison. All of these photographs come from a delightful manufacturer’s catalog for linoleum products (Il Linoleim nelle Costruzioni Scolastiche), which was printed in Milano in 1933.(The original is available at our blog bookstore.)

I’ll undoubtedly write a post on this stylistic beauty later on, but suffice to say for right now that it really is a lovely thing. If only we could forget the Mussolini part. Now I’m no fan, necessarily, of linoleum, but if I had to live on a linoleum island far removed from civilization and I had to choose a design for my world, I would choose the designs from this catalog, without hesitation. They’re spare, well-proportioned, beautifully design utilitarian designs; they are also very shiny and cold with a dispirited order, but so it goes. The catalog seems to speak for its times, the inspired design bowing to the weighty needs of the flatulent state.

Even though the people (mainly child people) are in very structured environments, they still look as though they really don’t believe in whatever it was was happening–of course the y were at school, or in an academic environment, or hospital, or something (as the titlf of the work states). There is something just wrong in the child-straight lines and seemless expanse of linoleum, something that looks as though details have been left out, that there is a ground-in sameness to everything, that the indifference to difference is so to make the children of a sort of sameness. Ihope that they did okay–most would be around 80 or 85 by now, if they survived.

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